Sunday, March 30, 2008

The BW 50 [Amazon.com snapshot]

Last year, Wall Street fell back in love with Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com. Sales at the Seattle e-commerce pioneer grew 38.5%, to $14.8 billion. Earnings grew 150%, to $476 million. Outside of Apple, Amazon (AMZN) may now be the strongest one-stop shop for digital media such as MP3 songs and online movies. It's certainly the leader in digital books, with the release of its Kindle e-reader and its acquisition of Audible.com. Perhaps Amazon's most promising development in 2007, though, was its Web-services platform, which allows other companies to buy the technology Amazon uses to run their own operations. Hundreds have signed on—mostly small tech startups.